we have all been 'had' re global warming

[howmuchdidyousay]

To think its the biggest conspiracy theory of all time ?

i hav watched an inconvenient Gore. not really inspiring (especially if you take that hockey stick graph, and take it back another 100,000 years odd..)

i get evry annoyed by every weather even tbeing linked to'climate change' - when of course weather s to do with the climate, but then, what the weather does this year or next doesn't really prove anything (one way or the other)

if you look at the kind of level event that can affect global climate (eg a volcano) for a short period, then it is conceivable tha human activity has an affect. Yet i feel this effect has been vastly over-egged - other major factors ignored. i don't think people like facing the truth about climate - we are insects on a ball orbitting another larger ball in a vacuum....very much passengers rather than drivers of the Earth, and subject to her climate rather than controllers of it.

that said, there are perfectly god reasons not to destroy Rainforests (people live in them, for one thing) conserve oil supplies (it's far too useful to burn!) and other solid fuels, and not coat the surface of the country with landfill sites.

if you look at the most successful environmental initiatives, these hav been useful and inventive ones that have made financial sense - good environmenal policy should save money not cost it.

currently much taxation is directed at taxing people higher for activities they have no choice in (e.g. driving to work) - these taxes particularly disadvantage low-income families (as the cost in running a car is roughly the same whether you eanr £100k or £10k - but wil take up a vastly higher %age of your income the lower on the scale you sit).

so..OP - YANBU

And all this friend of a friend stuff is ludicrous. Basically the evidence that anthropogenic global warning isn't happening is based on one geologist and the friend of a friend of someone on the internet. So about as plausible as that story about the woman who stops her car at night because there is a pram blocking the road and blah de blah... honest it is true, a friend of my sister's boyfriend told me.

As compared to all the peer reviewed papers. What a low opinion people have of scientists if they believe that thousands of academics would fake the evidence for this huge issue.

Ooh, Edgar, you may have one of these from me

milly isn't everyone's life being affected? not being allowed to buy light bulbs, having to recycle or be fined etc etc

And, Milly, as Ian Plimer points out, thirty years ago all doctors would have agreed that stomach ulcers were caused by excess acid. Until a couple of mavericks found it was due to bacteria and won the Nobel prize for it. We shouldn't stop thinking. The consensus isn't always right.

The lightbulbs and recycling would happen anyway; running out of oil and the problems of how to dispose of rubbish would exist regardless of global warming.

The UK is going to be one of the countries least damaged by global warming; I am sure the Government's concern will be our energy security and the possible economic impact.

And I recycle voluntarily - there are no fines where I live. It is up to the individual.

v v high up friend..

what, like.. God?

Of course the consensus isn't always right, but not many people work on stomach ulcers, and huge numbers of people work on climate change. The research that has been devoted to it is far greater.

Many things that we believe to be true will turn out not to be. I do not believe that the increasing public disbelief in climate change is caused by a lack of scientific evidence when so many other issues in science are more widely debated within science and have less evidence.

The reasons why people don't believe it are due to social and psychological issues, not scientific ones.

Can someone (briefly) explain WHO is going to benefit from 'the climate change conspiracy, in a way even approaching the degree to which oil/petro etc industries benefit from us going 'lalala it's all fine.'

lol, well my friend thought he was God at the time, the futher up the Bush administrations arse he got, the more of a wanker he became.

"The reasons why people don't believe it are due to social and psychological issues, not scientific ones."

how frightfully presumptuous of you particularly given your reasoning that "not many people work on stomach ulcers anyway" which is a bit eh what?

and obv not just oil industries but the whole teetering pile of greed which balances on top.

Also, who is this 'we' who shouldn't stop thinking? Are you suggesting that it was some sceptical, maverick member of the public who discovered this bacterial link? I suspect it was a thinking scientist who made the link.

If the public cared, they would make an effort to engage with learning about science and working in science rather than engaging with a social debate about science. That is a general problem in the UK education system though.

there are lots of tax credits and government spending going into "green" activities. The spending may seem relatively small now but it is rapidly growing. Look at how half of the US and Latin America started planting corn to process into biofuels, displacing crops that people need for food. It was more lucrative to cash in on the subsidies for growing something that could be used for green energy.

my view is that I don't know the extent of human's impact, but that it's right to respect your environment and recycle, shun excess packaging, etc.

But I think we should focus more effort and money on adapting, not fending off something we have little control over at this stage.

Not that many do work on researching stomach ulcers. How is that even vaguely contentious?

The social response to climate change has been studied and published in peer review journals. I am not making a presumption; I have simply read the research on why people are responding in the way that they are.

Goodnightmoon, I entirely agree with you. We should be finding ways to adapt.

have copied and pasted this from Plimer:

"governments using anthopomorphic global warming as an excuse for greater taxation, regulation and protectionism and energy companies and investors who stand to make a fortune from scams like carbon trading".

And journalists feed public anxiety and are not impartial. No environment correspondent is going to write herself out of a job.

Maybe I didn't mean you then Milly, you can stop if you like.

Milly, you're just too dismissive for my liking. Lots of people who think there's another side to the AGM debate still agree with conserving resources, taking action on pollution and landfill and so on. You have that "white coat" approach.

Don't really see the logic behind someone's point earlier that it's the oil companies who have most to gain since they're the ones with the most to lose if only the naysayers would, as MillyR suggests, take a look at the scientific consensus, not just a few mavericks with loud voices on the web.

And if you prefer to think "I'm all right, Jack" about the UK not being dramatically affected, just think about the challenge of massive migration from the myriad developing countries whose ecosystems and food production systems are screwed by desertification and flooding: the whole thrust of the Stern report was one of self-interest, namely that it would cost us all much less to pay to try to mitigate mankind's negative impact on the climate than to do so later when we've missed all opportunity to make much real difference. And we've dithered about for a few years since Stern, so we're in an even more difficult situation now with smaller national budgets and more short-sighted outlooks.

Turning off your lights and other similar actions save you money. Where's the conspiracy in that?

SIL, you are demonstrating my point perfectly. Your argument is based on human behaviour and motivations. You are not basing your opinion on any familiarity with the scientific evidence.

Jkk the issue for me is not whether climate change happens, it's whether it's down to us.

No, my comment about you being dismissive (which I think you are saying is based on human motivation?) is just about your approach to others' scepticism, not about AGM. My opinion of your approach does not inform my scepticism.

I was actually responding to your cut and paste of an expert; the cut and paste was about motivations, not evidence.

I see no point in responding to your opinion of me; it is not relevant to the debate.

Mr Rollmops here,

I trained as a physicist and worked for the Met Office in the '80s and have a number of chums who are still there.

In short, it's bolleaux. There is no allowance made in any of the climate models for the increased absorption of CO2 by trees and marine algae. They increase their metabolic rate in response to improved growing conditions. Why is this ignored, well reduced predictions equals reduced research funding equals reduced reasons for taxes equals reduced control of a gullible population who will fund governments to pursue the aims of the politicians etc. etc. etc.

Every time I read that the rainforests are the lungs of the planet, my bullshit meter goes off the scale. The rainforests are hugely important and unique eco-systems with the vast majority of almost all of this planet's very precious species. We should save them at all costs but they do not contribute significantly to sustaining life. The vast northern forest that stretches all around the northern hemisphere from Norway to Newfoundland in an almost unbroken band combined with the huge annual algal blooms that turn the oceans green contribute to almost all of our atmospheric oxygen...... and almost all of our CO2 absorption. The theory that this will turn our oceans acidic is crap. Dissolve CO2 in water and you make a very weak acid, absorb CO2 by growing micro skeletons and you make calcium carbonate which locks the CO2 away. Hint, look at those shiny white cliffs at Dover which were once the sea bed.

We're going through an interim period of cooling at the moment and there may be a case for long trend overall warming. Google the Nasa studies on the warming of Mars and you don't have to be a genius to suss out that the sun is a major factor. Combine this with the fact that most air temperature recording sites are now surrounded by tarmac and concrete which warm up fast in the sun and retain their heat into the evening and hey presto, the recorded air temperature at those sites is observed to increase over a period of decades. Heathrow airport use to be mostly grass and now the nearest large field is miles away.

I read some headlines recently that sea levels are rising in Western Australia. I have no doubt that is true. Our family holiday home is in the Baltic and the high tide mark has receded by some 100m in the last 50 years as the sea level has fallen. (Land is a good investment eh ?). Which story made the headlines, well it's not that Mr Rollmops has a bigger garden. The polar icecaps are receding as we are coming out of the last ice age. The Earth's crust is elastic over geological time so take away 3 vertical miles of ice and what do you expect will happen in the North ? The earth's crust pushes up. The water has to go somewhere so what will therefore happen closer to the equator which incidentally is where the maldives are ?

Before the sandal wearers who knit their own lentils jump down my throat, burning our finite carbon fuel resources is a daft idea as when they're gone, they're gone. Just don't tax me up to the nuts on the back of your flawed theories.

Our new log burner is being installed tomorrow and I look forward to spending the winter in front of it. Wood grows on trees after all and there are billions of them where I live.